Documenting death: open the records

It will surely come as no surprise to Americans in this unending interminable election season that the entire nation is — and our politicians are — occasionally hoodwinked.

On no topic have they and we been more misled than on the topic of the records of death in this country, and as genealogists, researchers, and family historians, we are among those paying the highest price for having fallen for it.

The documentary evidence that there is no justification for closing death records is mounting rapidly. And that evidence exists, in part, because we fell for it: closing the Social Security Death Index (SSDI) — the Death Master File (DMF) in government-speak — in the budget deal of 2013 led to the collection of data that shows pretty clearly that — surprise surprise (insert sarcasm icon of choice)– there is no good reason for closing death records.

You may recall — The Legal Genealogist surely does1 — the agonizing debates that led up to our losing access to the SSDI three years ago. Social Security numbers (SSNs) from genealogy sites that used the SSDI were being used, we were told, to file fraudulent tax returns, disrupt people’s financial lives, and cost the government millions of dollars.

And Fred Moss, writing for the Records Preservation and Access Committee blog, aptly summarizes the bill of goods that the Congress was sold at that time. Congress was told, and it believed (or allowed itself to accept), that:

1. The DMF/SSDI was a substantial source of SSNs used in filing fraudulent tax returns.

2. SSNs of deceased individuals need to be protected in the same ways we safeguard those of the living.

3. Simple fix (Silver Bullet?) – Just limit access to DMF

4. Unstated assumption: Nothing would be lost by closing this resource.

We’re now three years along in closing access to the SSDI/DMF and guess what?

Not one bit of that bill of goods turns out to be true.

It turns out — as we had all said at the time — that identity thieves don’t particularly want the social security identifiers of dead people at all. They’re trying to get and use the SSNs of living people instead. Letting the whole world know when someone has died works to reduce identity theft, not increase it, so closing death records isn’t any kind of a magic bullet.

More importantly, there are terrible losses in many ways from not having access to death data: not just financial losses, but losses to medical researchers who can’t track subjects in research studies to correlate causes of death with diseases and exposures to toxic substances; losses to medical genealogists trying to track family health histories; losses to those seeking to identify the lost — military dead and John Does — to repatriate their remains.

And no, as any good genealogist could have told the Congress (and we sure tried to tell them…) — there really aren’t any good alternative sources for this sort of data.

The bottom line: it’s time to open death data. All death data. Death certificates at the state level as well as death information held by the federal government. There is no privacy interest served in not disclosing that someone has died. There are many interests that are served in ensuring that the fact of death is known.

Let’s keep on top of this issue, as genealogists, as family historians, as researchers. Just because Congress was sold a bill of goods in the past doesn’t mean we have to keep paying that bill.

I repeat, there’s a bottom line here: it’s time to open death data. All death data.

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17 Comments

Charles Hansen on November 1, 2016 at 10:26 am

The IRS had just changed their computer system to better check on deaths of taxpayers, they had checked on the primary taxpayer for years, but now they have the ability to check the spouse also. This year they are requiring W2’s and 1099’s be filed with social security and the IRS sooner so more false tax returns will be caught before a refund is issued.

The IRS had had the ability to use better systems for some time; it just hadn’t done it (and occasionally doesn’t even do well now). It has NOTHING to do with availability of death data, and everything to do with management at the IRS. Making death data widely available will reduce identity theft.

As executor, I had to get a parent listed as deceased with the credit reporting bureaus to prevent ID theft of credit. It took a court order to get one of them to listen. Even then, that credit bureau flirted with the idea of defying our local court. Closure of death records does nothing to prevent this type of ID theft. Federal reform of the credit reporting system is needed, not records closure.

Medical ID theft has been an overlooked problem for both the living and the dead. Closure of death records does nothing to prevent this.

Theft of the SS benefits sent to dead persons is made easier by records closure. I could list more examples but the point should be made.

Judy G. Russell on November 1, 2016 at 11:06 am

There are so many similar cases, where closing the records actually makes identity theft easier!

G on November 1, 2016 at 2:22 pm

And one of the biggest sources of SSNs for identity thieves is our Medicare program. Congress has twice ordered Medicare to stop using SSNs as health insurance iD numbers, and so far, all they have done for the last 10-20 years is continue to study the problem, while senior citizens continue to be forced to hand over their SSN to a new set of strangers every time they need to visit the doctor or the pharmacy.

Charles Hansen on November 1, 2016 at 5:25 pm

I agree the IRS computer system was so old nearly all the programmers had retired and the IRS brought them back each year to upgrade their old program. The IRS still has the ability to access the SSDI and they are doing a lot more to catch the identity thieves.

“All the voting by dead people which has been proven” — to be about 0.0001%. Maybe less. See The Truth About Voter Fraud, by Justin Levitt.

nancy on November 1, 2016 at 1:37 pm

I cannot agree more with your conclusion – FAR better to know that someone is dead! I also agree with ensuring state death records are open. Fortunately for me, Ohio (where many of the people in my family tree lived and died) considers death records to be public documents. I continue to be mystified by states that do not allow ANY access to death records except to members of the immediate family for 50 (or more) years (I keep an ongoing list of when records will become available so I can make requests). Keep up the good work, Judy.

Judy, I thank you so much for your clear and concise words! I so appreciate the logical layout of the argument that death records should be open to all. My professional position involves (among many other things) the confirmation of deaths so that a database can be kept up-to-date. Losing the most recent death information from the DMF has made this much more challenging. And it just does not make sense to limit this information.

Every doctor’s office asks me about an extended family health history. It is necessary for us to have an accurate picture of what our ancestors died from; death information should not be withheld from the public.

This fight is only a little bit with Congress, and there the way to address this is locally, with your local representative. Get to know him or her. Research his or her family history. Invite the Congress member to a genealogical society meeting to speak. Make it clear why it’s important on a personal level. And then do the same thing with your state and local representatives, because death certificate info access is controlled by the states individually.

One can essentially thank Sam Johnson of Texas for closing off the SSDI. He led the charge to “fix” this problem despite being briefed extensively with the arguments folks have said (above). It was a chance to embarrass an administration he, to stay polite, doesn’t like and reality really had no hand in this.

If you want to wonder, consider the “protection” that Commerce, via the NTIS, has put in place to keep the DMF data out of the public for 3 years. It sounds very tough, but I’m given to understand that it’s all self-certifying and that NTIS doesn’t (well, hadn’t as of 2015) audit these organizations, so it would not be hard to get credentials from NTIS and access the DMF as a trusted party. So much for the vaunted protection.

As for the IRS, they for decades had access to the full DMF to run against their files and identify deceased taxpayers but simply never did. It was their choice. Yes their systems capabilities were an issue, but access to the data was never an issue.

Remember, users of the DMF agree, in writing when given access, that they will not act unilaterally with the data but will confirm the data before using it. Consider though that if these 3rd parties buying DMF data actually sent out a letter to the “dead” person prior to closing their account or other action, few living people listed as dead in error would be hurt by mistakes. Those stories of people having their credit cards and utilities shut off because they were erroneously listed as dead only occur because those companies don’t take 30 days to see if the person is really dead. Saves them a months worth of “overpayment” and the few times it turns out the individual is actually alive, the government gets the blame.

And all this talk about ID fraud for the dead, people here have it spot on right. By telling people and companies that these people are dead, gives these companies a heads up to annotate their files that a person MAY be deceased and allows them to prevent or identify possible fraud. But keeping this information selectively hidden for 3 years, along with not making companies warn consumers before taking an action hurts consumers in so many ways. But it did make for a good press release, cost SSA and Commerce some millions in resources that might have had better uses.

The IRS had a series of progams under the collective name Deferred Adverse Tax Consequences (DATC). One of these checked for an SSN that had been reported as belonging to a deceased person. In the ’90s, I managed a group of people working this program. At that time, we found that most of the problems were caused because few older women worked outside the home. At that time, the women did not have their own SSN. For Medicare, they used the husband’s number with a “B” suffix. They used this number in the secondary position on the Form 1040. When the husband passed, they filed using that number and their own name in the primary position. This caused the return to be held. Once they were able to verify, the return went through normal processing. Since this was the norm at that time, it was not a cost effective program. The IRS stopped using it. I am fairly certain that, given how long ago this was, that nobody in charge of programs has any institutional knowledge of DATC programs. If they could resurrect it, it would vastly diminish any issues of this type.

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